sharptalon and the gulch

so - a new adventure.

i got home last night in a blur of emotional distress and needed some gaming - serious gaming - to get me through the night without resorting to the old "slit wrists with broken bottle and hope no one hears me crying in the bathtub" thing.

thank god for wow.

anyway, i decided that i would destroy something i tried to kill a few levels ago. namely, sharptalon, that slow-flying crazy thing which haunts the area outside splintertree post.

i solemnly announced my intention to my fellow iron fisties, and went in.

i swung my axe for all it's worth and splashed it with a million bits of rage-driven stuff and finally sat back on a rock to survey the damage.

and what a damage it was!

what a fight! so much fun.

after that, i decided to try my hand slaughtering demons and a few more satyrs. brilliant.

but then, around 1am, i started getting a bit bored. i trekked to orgrimmar and did a bit of a peruse of the auction house, but nothing grabbed me.

then i realised i'd gone up a level and should think about talking to the warrior trainer and getting any extra skills to play with. which i did - but there wasn't anything i hadn't already bought that i wanted. damn.

then i remember warsong gulch being spoken of lately. apparently it's double honour weekend - whatever that is, so i wondered just what the hell the fuss was all about.

i clicked a guy and asked him. he asked me to join a queue.

i joined a queue. to what, i didn't know. finally a button came up and asked me if i wanted to join the battlefield.

i shrugged, clicked okay and found myself in a room. woah.

hadn't expected that.

on climbing out of the room, i found a battleground resembling something from my old quake days. sparing a small tear of nostalgia for tf, i wished i had my sniper rifle. instead, i leapt off a small hill much in the same way i used to leap off the ledge in 2forts, and joined the carnage.

i was always good at quake. really.

loved it.

was a better sniper than anything else, but nothing got me off more than slipping down corridors blasting my way to the flag and then blasting my way back out again. that tight feeling as you land the flag and turn to find your enemies just arriving late from the chase is just breathtakingly surreal and there's nothing like the kill die respawn cycle to keep your adrenaline pumping hardcore jellybean-sized bubbles of energy into your brain all night long.

so, i kind of leered as i ran toward the battle, mostly in pity as these poor puny looking fellows were about to get a damn good dose of my steely axe of wrath.

i leapt on one little gnome guy.

and died.

woah.

so quick.

something, you see, i hadn't taken into consideration, was the fact that i suck at this.

the mechanics are completely different when playing pvp than they are pve, so i was completely and totally unprepared. to put it mildly, i got owned. bigtime.

growling at my monitor, i was ejected from the battleground at the end like some kind of embarassed newbie. i was stunned at just how badly i got my warrior ass kicked.

so i did the only thing i could do - based on my day of emotional trauma and psychological distress in regard to the girl of my dreams being completely unattracted to a nerdy weed like me - i went the hell back in and gripped my axe a little tighter in my fist and prepared to give some ownage right the hell back.

and i did.

after about three battlegrounds i started to get a nice feel of comfort. most games were pretty haphazard and distressingly chaotic. no sense of teamplay or anything. but that kind of added to the spice, i think. i had more fun in the chaotic games than i did in the ones where we won comfortably. one game went for about an hour - with one guy complaining endlessly about the deadlock which remained at zero flags to both teams for well over fortyfive minutes.

the killing seemed endless, and i managed to rack up a decent amount of kills. i wasn't in the top five, but i was slowly edging myself up over the course of the night, wading in and swinging about, picking off the weeds stupid enough to wander about like me - on their own. i mean, let's face it - i'm the king of zatoichi-style. i don't care who you are - you're mincemeat if i get you on your own.

of course, i discovered that rogues suck, and paladins are annoying. i discovered that ranged weapons are a pain in the butt. it seems you can't miss with a range weapon, but melee combat becomes similar to axe-wielding desperate moments from quake in that you bounce and spin around an awful lot trying to deal while avoiding and i seem to use a whole lot less fun skills than i'd like.

i got killed a lot. an awful lot. but i like to think i held on okay. i felt comfortable. i felt pretty good.

so, tonight, as i wind down for the evening, i'm about to do it a little more.

i mean, why not?

have axe will lop heads off, after all...